The Bridge Trilogy Part 58

once, in an ancient cartoon. "You are an idiot."

"Why?"

"You carried a bag through customs? A stranger's bag?"

"Yes - "Idiot!"

"I am not."

"She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive."

But you went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and suddenly felt like crying. "But why are

they looking for me?"

Zona shrugged. "In the District, a cautious smuggler would not let a mule go free.

Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere behind and below Chia's navel,

and with it came the unwelcome recollection of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of something she hadn't recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between her t-s.h.i.+rts. When she'd used one to dry her hands.

"What's wrong?"

112 William Gibson I "I better go. Mitsuko went to make tea. . . Talking too quickly, biting off the words.

"Go? Are you insane? We must-"

"Sorry. 'Bye." Pulling off the goggles and scrabbling at the wrist-fasteners.

Her bag there, where she'd left it.

113.

17. The Walls of Fame

"We had no time to do this right," the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. "If there is a way to do it right."

There are areas we could not arrange access to," said the j.a.panese-American with the ponytail. "Blackwell said you've had experience with celebrities."

"Actors," Laney said. "Musicians, politicians .

"You'll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple oi degrees of magnitude.'

"What cant you access?" Laney asked, settling the 'phones over his eyes.

We don't know," he heard the woman say. "You'll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The

blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts . . . We're just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible."

"Then why not bring them in?" Laney asked.

He felt Blackwell's hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of

sand. "I'll discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a

look. What we pay you for, isn't it?"

In the week following Alison s.h.i.+res' death, Laney had used Out of

Control's DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal

data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.

But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.

The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.

He'd looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.

Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.

A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there: toothbrush, toothpaste, a.n.a.lgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.

Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer's warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, 116 William Gibson the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-btown beach, and then the gray and silver sea.

Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image's border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.

Laney tried to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of brick faced with elaborately glazed, lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily have stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disa.s.sembly, cleaning, restoration, and rea.s.sembly of each brick in each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment, but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to a.s.sume that it was very large. He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted the final price of the work; at current rates it was more than several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.

He clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider view, a sense of form, -but there were only walls, bulking ma.s.ses of meticulously arranged information, and he remembered Alison s.h.i.+res and his apprehension of het data-death.

"The lights are on," Laney said, removing the eyephones, "but there's n.o.body home." He checked the

computer's clock: he'd spent a little over twenty minutes in there.

Blackwell regarded him dourly, settled on an injection-molded crate like a black-draped Buddha, the scars in his eyebrows knitted into new configurations of concern. The three technicians looked carefully blank, hands in the pockets of their matching jackets.

"How's that, rheni" Blackwell asked.

"I'm not sure," Laney said. 'He doesn't seem to do anything."

"He doesn't b.l.o.o.d.y do anything but do things," Blackwell declared, "as you'd know if you were orchestrating his b.l.o.o.d.y security!"

"Okay," Laney said, "then where'd he have breakfast?" Blackwell looked uncomfortable. "In his

suite."

"His suite where?'

"Imperial Hotel." Blackwell glared at the technicians. "Which empire, exactly?"

"Here. b.l.o.o.d.y Tokyo"

"Here? He's in Tokyo?"

"You lot," Blackwell said, "outside,' The brown-haired woman shrugged, inside her nylon jacket,

and went kicking through the Styrofoam, head down, the other two following in her wake. When the tarp dropped behind them, Blackwell rose from his crate. "Don't think you can try me on for size.

"l'm telling you that I don't think this is going to work. Your man isn't in there."

'~That's his b.l.o.o.d.y life."

"How did he pay for his breakfast?"

"Signed to the suite."

"Is the suite in his name?"

"Of course not."

"Say he needs to buy something, during the course of the day?"

"Someone buys it for him, don't they?"

"And pays with?"

"A card,"

"But not in his name."

"Right."

"So if anyone were looking at the transaction data, there'd be no way to connect it directly to